The present invention relates to portable storage devices and, more particularly, to a secure portable storage device.
Portable storage devices such as floppy disks, optical disks, flash memory disks and digital tapes, serve users for various purposes, such as copying files from one computer to another, carrying a backup copy of one's files, or synchronizing work spaces among the hard disks of an office PC, a home PC and a laptop computer.
Portable devices can be lost or stolen, exposing their owner to the risk of others reading sensitive information from his/her work or private files. Therefore, it is highly desirable to secure information stored on a portable storage device under the user's password or biometric signature. An obvious way to do so is by encrypting the files on a source computer prior to copying the files to the portable storage device and then retrieving the encrypted version at a target computer and decrypting the files there for further use. This requires both manual effort at both ends, as well as having the same security software at both ends, which are inconvenient and often impractical.
Some recent portable storage devices include an onboard processor, which allows incorporating security functions within the device. For example, DiskOnKey™, a commercial portable flash disk produced by M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers, Ltd. of Kfar Saba, Israel, features a locking utility called KeySafe, which offers a secure partition within the storage device, A user's password is required both for accessing the secure partition and reading files therefrom, because files are encrypted on-the-fly by the unit's onboard processor when written onto the secure partition and decrypted on-the-fly when read from the secure partition. The security mechanism of KeySafe is described in co-pending U.S. patent application publication No. 2004/0103288 titled “Apparatus and method for securing data on a portable storage device”, which is incorporated herein by reference for all purposes as if fully set forth herein.
In a typical scenario, the user mounts his/her portable storage device on a computer, unlocks the portable storage device by keying-in a password (or entering a biometric signature, e.g. through a fingerprint reader), and then copies files from one device to another. File copying can be done either manually, or by using backup or synchronization utilities, such as the Briefcase folder synchronization utility which is part of the Microsoft Windows™ operating system.
Entering a password or a biometric signature each time the portable storage device is mounted is inconvenient. This inconvenience will often drive users to give up security and carry all their files in clear thus overlooking the risk of loss or theft. The current conflict between security and convenience is a drawback of current securable portable storage devices.
There is thus a widely recognized need for, and it would be highly advantageous to have, a portable storage device on which data can be securely stored and retrieved in a manner that would overcome the disadvantages described above.